The belay test and the modern American climbing gym

I indoor climb with a friend semi regularly using a grigri, and it is important to be intentional about giving the climber your full attention and never taking your hand off the rope entirely [1]. Very similar to how the person qualifying you during a check ride for your private pilot certification will attempt to distract you on a final approach to see if you take the bait. If you don't want to or can't pay attention, that's what the auto belay [2] is for.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAxY-BBSlGc

[2] https://www.verticalendeavors.com/auto-belays-pros-and-cons/

(my climbing venue monitors and scolds you if you aren't paying attention while belaying, ymmv)

The grigri in particular is a bit of a mixed blessing. Because it has an auto brake, it's harder -- though not impossible, as you indicate -- to just totally fail to brake the climber on top rope. If you let go of an ATC, there is no braking and the rope just runs through, which is obviously very bad. By contrast, if you just let go of an grigri it will lock, arresting the fall.

However, when lead belaying, you need to pay out rope, which means disengaging the auto brake. If you do this buy holding the handle and the climber falls at the wrong time, it's easy to react by just holding everything tighter, at which point you're holding the grigri open, at which point the auto brake isn't doing anything. By contrast with an ATC or other tube-type device you never have to touch the belay device and so you always can keep your brake hand in the brake position, so if the climber falls, your reflex action -- assuming you have practiced -- should be to pull harder with your brake hand, thus arresting the fall.

Aside from belay devices, some other practices I've seen gyms do to try make indoor climbing safer:

- Captive grigris on top rope so that you (1) have to use a grigri and (2) can't screw up putting them on and off. - High friction toprope anchors (e.g., wrapped several times around a pipe) so that even with no belay device at all there is still some friction. - Requiring people to tie in with a trace eight rather than a double bowline on the theory that the trace eight is harder to screw up and easier to check.

I supervised a small climbing wall for one year in the mid 2000s. I was really strict about our belay test, but we had some flexibility built in. If you had experience climbing, you could show us your technique and we'd pass you if your technique kept the climber safe at all times.

It didn't happen often, but there were a number of people who had over a decade of experience, who didn't realize they were leaving the climber vulnerable to a catastrophic fall in some of their transitions. Those people had just never had anyone fall at that point in their belaying.

They were momentarily embarrassed, but to their credit everyone I had to call out about technique appreciated not being given a pass because of their years of experience.

It would be interesting to compare the accident statistics with European climbing gyms where belay tests are not common.

The coach in the video has some of the worst belay technique I have ever seen. Unfortunately, this is somewhat common among older climbers who learned using the first generation Grigri in the 90s. Petzl's recommended technique back then is very safe (essentially using the Grigri like an ATC), but does not allow giving slack quickly. This made it completely useless for any kind of ambitious sports climbing, and people started coming up with often extremely dangerous workarounds. Petzl has upgraded their recommendations a long time ago, but some people are resistant to change ("it never failed for me"...) Hopefully this video can convince at least some of them to finally adopt the proper technique.

> more experienced climbers can get complacent and sloppy when the negative consequences fail to materialize.

This effect in some fields is called "Normalisation of Deviance". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

It was even worse, the coach held grigri totally wrong the whole time, it would fail even if he wasn't chatting and concentrated on his climber.

Ah yeah I saw that video before, so bad. If I saw someone belaying like that I'd immediately call them out and tell them to hold the brake strand. Lucky this was even caught on video to prove what the error was. It's disturbing to see how his right hand still appears to just hold onto the gri-gri while the climber falls (rather than grabbing the rope). Inexcusable IMO, especially for someone who isn't a total beginner. There's no "people make mistakes" caveat here, that was straight-up dangerous technique, like driving a car with no hands on the wheel or with a blindfold on.

It was a big story a while back that someone noticed that climbing deaths increase with experience, and the blame was ultimately attributed to equipment wear, especially ropes.

Once you start trusting the rope and the belay, you better be sure you can trust that rope, and your partner.

You still need to be careful. I'm an avid climber. Most autobelay accidents happen because people don't clip in properly. However for me the auto belay cable broke after catching me. Resulted in five minor spinal fractures.

So from my experience I would say at least Google what are the common auto belay manufacturers and only use gyms that have them. True Blue and Perfect Decent are the only auto belays I will touch now.

My understanding is that our local climbing gym sees most of its non-bouldering accidents from people not clipping into autobelays before they start climbing.

Fyi: autobelay is how most people deck and die in the gym (forgetting to clip)

Unfortunately, auto belays are also pretty terrible once you’re familiar with climbing - they pull on you and make harder climbing extremely awkward.

> The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods. This is very interesting, since many climbers work in forward-thinking tech companies.

Maybe moving fast and breaking things is not always appropriate.

> The market for climbing is built through reputation, tradition, & thus a visceral rejection of new ideas & methods.

Every climber I meet is lovely, but there is your standard sports equipment elitism at play as well, not to be confused with the very real brand loyalism that comes out of trusting something with your life.

I think if you are bringing a product into the climbing space you would do well to lead with a low risk product for brand reputation, something like a hangboard or training equipment perhaps.

absolutely legendary. Like they would throw a concrete weight off the top of the wall, and you would catch it with a hip belay?

Never thought I'd see Boulders Climbing Gym mentioned on HN! I loved going to the downtown location as a college student and everyone I met there was so nice and helpful.

Wow, what a cool piece of Madison history. I spent a lot of afternoons at Boulders in the mid-2010s but never knew that it had a predecessor like that.

Whoa, (indoor) climbing seems to have a rich history in Edmonton, and I had no idea.

"Old and grungy" they may be, but Touchstone seems to be doing well enough to expand dramatically. They've got a dozen+ locations.

It's worth noting that (AFAIK) it's not a standardized test. The gym I go to doesn't let you tie your own knots on topropes and they're already inserted into a Grigri (not sure what the lead climbers use, but that's separate).

> I always assumed there was just something about the type of people who work in tech that they're weirdly more into climbing than average.

You were right the first time. Climbing is a largely constrained problem solving exercise with binary outcomes (you either did the route or didn't) and a built-in level-up style progression in the grading system. (Today I did my fist V2! etc...) You can do it entirely on your own, at your own time, in your own pace and it's not really possible to "lose" at climbing[1], you get unlimited attempts to try and figure it out. You can, for outdoor climbs, try the climb, fail, train for 6 months and retry the climb to succeed. In short it's almost designed to be addictive to coder types, but all that came before the indoor walls, not after.

Source: I climb obsessively. They got me good.

[1] - competition climbing aside, obviously